Imagine someone tells you that the winning lottery numbers were 18-24-27-42-43 / 34. There’s only a one in 175,223,510 chance that those are actually the lottery numbers that won. Since there’s more than a one in 175,223,510 that they’re lying, it might seem at first that you should conclude that they’re lying. But lying explains all 175,223,510 possibilities equally. If they lie, there’s still only a one in 175,223,510 chance that they’d say those numbers. So it’s not evidence one way or the other.
It seems to me this is true only if you have no idea of what motivates people to lie. From experience not pertaining to lottery I’d say it’s much more likely that people lie when they know the lottery number than when they don’t know the lottery number. In this sense you’re right that lying alone explains everything, but we don’t live in a world where lying and hallucinations are phenomena isolated from the rest of our knowledge, and we shouldn’t assume by default we live in such a world when we use language.
It seems to me this is true only if you have no idea of what motivates people to lie. From experience not pertaining to lottery I’d say it’s much more likely that people lie when they know the lottery number than when they don’t know the lottery number. In this sense you’re right that lying alone explains everything, but we don’t live in a world where lying and hallucinations are phenomena isolated from the rest of our knowledge, and we shouldn’t assume by default we live in such a world when we use language.